The “legacy of slavery” argument is not just an excuse for inexcusable behavior in the ghettos. In a larger sense, it is an evasion of responsibility for the disastrous consequences of the prevailing social vision of our times, and the political policies based on that vision, over the past half century.

Anyone who is serious about evidence need only compare black communities as they evolved in the first 100 years after slavery with black communities as they evolved in the first 50 years after the explosive growth of the welfare state, beginning in the 1960s.

You would be hard-pressed to find as many ghetto riots prior to the 1960s as we have seen just in the past year, much less in the 50 years since a wave of such riots swept across the country in 1965.

We are told that such riots are a result of black poverty and white racism. But in fact — for those who still have some respect for facts — black poverty was far worse, and white racism was far worse, prior to 1960. But violent crime within black ghettos was far less. You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Murder rates among black males were going down — repeat, down — during the much-lamented 1950s, while it went up after the much celebrated 1960s, reaching levels more than double what they had been before. Most black children were raised in two-parent families prior to the 1960s. But today the great majority of black children are raised in one-parent families.

Such trends are not unique to blacks, nor even to the United States. The welfare state has led to remarkably similar trends among the white underclass in England over the same period. Just read Life at the Bottom, by Theodore Dalrymple, a British physician who worked in a hospital in a white slum neighborhood.

You cannot take any people, of any color, and exempt them from the requirements of civilization — including work, behavioral standards, personal responsibility, and all the other basic things that the clever intelligentsia disdain — without ruinous consequences to them and to society at large.

Non-judgmental subsidies of counterproductive lifestyles are treating people as if they were livestock, to be fed and tended by others in a welfare state — and yet expecting them to develop as human beings have developed when facing the challenges of life themselves.

One key fact that keeps getting ignored is that the poverty rate among black married couples has been in single digits every year since 1994. Behavior matters and facts matter, more than the prevailing social visions or political empires built on those visions.

“There is something profoundly wrong when African-American men are still far more likely to be stopped and searched by police, charged with crimes, and sentenced to longer prison terms than are meted out to their white counterparts. There is something wrong when a third of all black men face the prospect of prison during their lifetimes,” Clinton said. “We have allowed our criminal justice system to get out of balance and these recent tragedies should galvanize us to come together as a nation to find our balance again.”

Clinton’s speech came in the wake of Monday’s racially-charged riots in Baltimore, Maryland, in which violent protesters raged after the funeral of 25-year-old Freddie Gray, who died on April 19 after suffering a fatal spinal injury in police custody. The incident is just one of a number of controversial police-involved deaths of African-American men, which protesters have attributed to a racist criminal justice system.

For her part, Clinton said she saw a “unmistakable and undeniable” pattern in their deaths.

“Yet again the family of a young black men is grieving a life cut short. Yet again the streets of an American city are marred by violence, by shattered glass, and shouts of anger and shows of force. Yet again a community is reeling, its fault lines laid bare,” she said. ”From Ferguson to Staten Island to Baltimore, the patterns have become unmistakable and undeniable.”

Would any sentient adult American be shocked to learn that Baltimore has a corrupt and feckless police department enabled by a corrupt and feckless city government? I myself would not, and the local authorities’ dishonesty and stonewalling in the death of Freddie Gray is reminiscent of what we have seen in other cities. There’s a heap of evidence that the Baltimore police department is pretty bad.

This did not come out of nowhere. While the progressives have been running the show in Baltimore, police commissioner Ed Norris was sent to prison on corruption charges (2004), two detectives were sentenced to 454 years in prison for dealing drugs (2005), an officer was dismissed after being videotaped verbally abusing a 14-year-old and then failing to file a report on his use of force against the same teenager (2011), an officer was been fired for sexually abusing a minor (2014), and the city paid a quarter-million-dollar settlement to a man police illegally arrested for the non-crime of recording them at work with his mobile phone. There’s a good deal more. Does that sound like a disciplined police organization to you

The other Democratic monopolies aren’t looking too hot, either. We’re sending Atlanta educators to prison for running a criminal conspiracy to hide the fact that they failed, and failed woefully, to educate the children of that city. Isolated incident? Nope: Atlanta has another cheating scandal across town at the police academy. Who is being poorly served by the fact that Atlanta’s school system has been converted into crime syndicate? Mostly poor, mostly black families. Who is likely to suffer from any incompetents advanced through the Atlanta police department by its corrupt academy? Mostly poor, mostly black people. Who suffers most from the incompetence of Baltimore’s Democratic mayor? Mostly poor, mostly black families — should they feel better that she’s black? Who suffers most from the incompetence and corruption of Baltimore’s police department? Mostly poor, mostly black families.

And it’s the same people who will suffer the most from the vandalism and pillaging going on in Baltimore, too.

The evidence suggests very strongly that the left-wing, Democratic claques that run a great many American cities — particularly the poor and black cities — are not capable of running a school system or a police department. They are incompetent, they are corrupt, and they are breathtakingly arrogant. Cleveland, Philadelphia, Detroit, Baltimore — this is what Democrats do.

How do you expect black youths to react to the Left’s orchestrated campaign to convince them that white Republicans and conservatives are racist and out to get them, that white cops murder them at will, that the rich got rich stealing from them, and that business owners are selfish and evil?

These lies have been sold to black youths by the highest black voices in the country — Obama, Oprah, Sharpton, Holder, Jackson, the NAACP, the Congressional Black Caucus, and assorted other race exploiting scumbags. …if I sound angry, it is because I am.

It’s not just important, but it’s essential, for marginalized groups to have safe spaces on campus to engage with people who understand what they go through. Though this group is funded by Ryerson’s student union, it works to serve a particular group and a particular purpose. Many students at Ryerson have encountered racism in their life that is impossible to forget and many are exposed to discrimination on a daily basis. This group and these sort of events allow people of colour to lay bare their experiences and to collectively combat this societal ailment. These spaces are rare places in the world not controlled by individuals who have power, who have privilege.
These spaces, which are forums where minority groups are protected from mainstream stereotypes and marginalization, are crucial to resistance of oppression and we, as a school and as a society, need to respect them.
(…)
Segregation was imposed on people of colour by people of privilege, not the other way around. The very fact that individuals organizing to help each other get through social barriers and injustices are being attacked and questioned for their peaceful assembly is proof that they were right to exclude those students.
Racialized people experience systemic discrimination on a daily basis, on many levels, and in ways that white people may never encounter. The whole point of these safe spaces is to remove that power dynamic. That’s partly what makes them spaces for healing.
(…)
The West has a history of oppressing people of colour: from Africans who were enslaved and brought to the New World, to native people whose land was stolen by Europeans. This kind of oppression is still witnessed today, in the way the black community is treated in the United States, in the state of African nations trying to recover from the collapse of the previous colonial rule, and in the continuing struggles of indigenous peoples.

I’ve made it very clear that I work with the police, and instructed them to do everything that they could to make sure that the protesters could exercise their right to free speech. It’s a very delicate balancing act because while we tried to make sure they were protected from the cars and the other things that were going on, we gave those who wished to destroy space to do that, as well. And we worked very hard to keep that balance and to put ourselves in the best position to deescalate. And that’s what you saw.

Baltimore has the fifth highest big city murder rate in the country. The four cities ahead of it are Detroit, New Orleans, Newark and St. Louis. All these cities have something in common. Not racism, but race.

The killers and the dead are black.

The murder rate in Baltimore stood at 37.4 to 100,000 people. There have already been 63 murders this year. Fifty-six of the victims were black. Of the 16 murders in the last 30 days, 14 of the victims were black.

(…)

Baltimore’s peaceful protests were marred by smashing cars, smashing windows, throwing rocks and assaulting random people still showing their white faces in the city. The police tried to stay out of it giving the protesters and their supporters what they really wanted; the opportunity to commit crimes without being held accountable.

(…)

Baltimore has a black mayor, a black police commissioner and a majority non-white police force. Driving out the remaining white police officers will just eliminate the race card excuse for future riots.

Studies have shown that black officers are harder on black suspects and that cops already hesitate more before shooting black suspects than white suspects. The Detroit police force is 63% black. Federal oversight over it ended only recently. The Philadelphia police force has more blacks on it than any other racial group; it also has a high rate of police shootings and was targeted by the Justice Department.

(…)

In 2013, 2,245 black people were killed by other black people. Only 189 were killed by whites. In 2012, 2,412 black people were killed by other black people. That’s tens of thousands dead over a decade.

On race, however, Obama only has to show up. That’s how it works to be the first minority to achieve any high-profile role. It is a strange phenomenon. Simply by standing in a space long held by the same sorts of people - namely, white men - something shifts in the cosmos. Years ago, when Kansas City, Mo., elected its first black mayor, Emanuel Cleaver (now a member of Congress), some compared his impact on city race relations to the effect a teacher has by standing on the playground at recess. The kids play differently - more nicely. Point being that simply being in the room takes things up a notch.

Based on that data, Mr. Moskos reported that roughly 49 percent of those killed by officers from May 2013 to April 2015 were white, while 30 percent were black. He also found that 19 percent were Hispanic and 2 percent were Asian and other races.

His results, posted last week on his blog Cop in the Hood, arrived with several caveats, notably that 25 percent of the website’s data, which is drawn largely from news reports, failed to show the race of the person killed.

Killed by Police lists every death, justified or not, including those in which the officer had been wounded or acted in self-defense.

“The data doesn’t indicate which shootings are justified (the vast majority) and which are cold-blooded murder (not many, but some). And maybe that would vary by race. I don’t know, but I doubt it,” Mr. Moskos said on his blog.

Adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown of the U.S. population, he said black men are 3.5 times more likely to be killed by police than white men. But also adjusted to take into account the racial breakdown in violent crime, the data actually show that police are less likely to kill black suspects than white ones.

“If one adjusts for the racial disparity in the homicide rate or the rate at which police are feloniously killed, whites are actually more likely to be killed by police than blacks,” said Mr. Moskos, a former Baltimore cop and author of the book “Cop in the Hood.”

“Adjusted for the homicide rate, whites are 1.7 times more likely than blacks die at the hands of police,” he said. “Adjusted for the racial disparity at which police are feloniously killed, whites are 1.3 times more likely than blacks to die at the hands of police.”

Mr. Moskos listed two possible reasons for the racial disparity. The first is that police assigned to largely black neighborhoods face “more political fallout when they shoot, and thus receive better training and are less inclined to shoot.”

The second is that police assigned to black communities with high crime rates are more accustomed to dangerous situations and thus are more likely to be able to resolve them without resort to lethal force.

Figures on police shootings by race are thin on the ground, but Mr. Moskos’s results have some support: The investigative journalism website ProPublica came up with a similar percentage in an Oct. 10 article, reporting that 44 percent of all those killed by police were white, using FBI data from 1980 to 2012.

The fact-checking website PolitiFact concluded in August 2014 that police kill more whites than blacks after the claim was made by conservative commentator Michael Medved. PolitiFact cited data from the Centers for Disease Control on fatal injuries by “legal intervention” from 1999 to 2011.

“Over the span of more than a decade, 2,151 whites died by being shot by police compared to 1,130 blacks. In that respect, Medved is correct,” said PolitiFact.

But PolitiFact gave his assertion a “half true” rating because whites make up 63 percent of the population, while blacks make up just 12 percent.

“Yes, more whites than blacks die as a result of an encounter with police, but whites also represent a much bigger chunk of the total population,” PolitiFact said in its Aug. 21 post.

But PolitiFact did not take into account the percentage of those by race involved in violent crime or shootings of police, as Mr. Moskos did.

Despite the recent flood of media coverage involving police shootings, Mr. Moskos advised his readers to “keep all this morbidity in perspective,” reminding them that very few people, white or black, will ever be shot or killed by police.

“The odds that any given black man will shoot and kill a police officer in any given year is slim to none, about one in a million. The odds for any given white man? One in four million,” he said. “The odds that a black man will be shot and killed by a police officer is about 1 in 60,000. For a white man those odds are 1 in 200,000.”

Army officials are investigating a diversity training briefing at Fort Gordon, Ga., in which a slide about “white privilege” was inappropriately shown to soldiers, according to an Army spokeswoman

The Equal Opportunity briefing took place Thursday for about 400 soldiers of the 67th Signal Battalion, Capt. Lindsay Roman, an Army spokeswoman, said Friday. The slide titled “The Luxury of Obliviousness” has bullet-point items about “white privilege.”

One item reads, “Race privilege gives whites little reason to pay a lot of attention to African Americans or to how white privilege affects them. ‘To be white in America means not having to think about it.’ ”

An image of the slide appeared later Thursday on a Facebook page and generated a torrent of negative comments about political correctness run amok.

After one reads McIntosh’s powerful essay, it’s impossible to deny that being born with white skin in America affords people certain unearned privileges in life that people of other skin colors simply are not afforded. For example:

“I can turn on the television or open to the front page of the paper and see people of my race widely represented.”

“When I am told about our national heritage or about ‘civilization,’ I am shown that people of my color made it what it is.”

“If a traffic cop pulls me over or if the IRS audits my tax return, I can be sure I haven’t been singled out because of my race.”

“I can if I wish arrange to be in the company of people of my race most of the time.”

If you read through the rest of the list, you can see how white people and people of color experience the world in very different ways.

The description is eerily similar to another lethal confrontation with an unarmed black teen in broad daylight: the death of Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Florida. George Zimmerman, the man who shot and killed Martin, told police that the teen “jumped out from the bushes” and punched him in the face, knocking him down. “I started screaming for help. I couldn’t see. I couldn’t breathe,” he said. “He grabbed my head and started hitting it into the sidewalk. My head felt like it was going to explode.”

Zimmerman also claimed Martin put his hand over Zimmerman’s mouth and nose and told him, “You’re going to die tonight.”

Both Zimmerman and Darren Wilson told officials that the young men they killed had their hands in their waistbands—suggesting they feared the presence of a weapon when there was none.

Throughout his testimony, Wilson repeatedly referenced Brown’s size, calling him “really big,” “obviously bigger than I was,” and saying he felt “like a five-year-old holding onto Hulk Hogan,” though the two men were about the same height.

Later, describing the moment right after he first fired the first bullet, he said Brown “looked up at me and had the most intense aggressive face. The only way I can describe it, it looks like a demon.” In other places, he describes Brown in animalistic terms (“he made like a grunting, like aggravated sound”) and supernatural ones (“it looked like he was almost bulking up to run through the shots”).

Zimmerman offered a vaguer physical description, telling a 911 dispatcher that Martin looked like “real suspicious guy” and saying: “This guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something.”

Both Zimmerman and Wilson are free men today, in part because of these accounts and descriptions provided to law enforcement and the courts. Though the public may never know exactly what happened on those days, research shows that hidden biases often lead people to see African Americans as aggressive, superhuman and less vulnerable to pain.

But printing his street name in the nation’s most influential newspaper on the day the grand jury is expected to hand up a decision on the indictment could reignite interest in — and awareness of — the location, and some critics worry that it could result in protesters descending on his home. Slate even went a step further than the Times, publishing an article featuring a photo of the modest, red-brick house on Monday.

A number of Twitter users — some of whom have identified themselves as planning to protest the grand jury decision — have tweeted the location of Wilson’s home as they gear up for rallies. The house number was not printed in the Times, but the street in the St. Louis suburb of Crestwood where it sits is only about two blocks long, and the house number can be easily located via online sources using only the street name and Wilson’s name.

Brown wasn’t a person who allegedly robbed a convenience store. He was a stand-in for racial injustice. That’s what was so powerful about Brown’s (probably mythological) “hands up” gesture.

The outrage that followed when the convenience store robbery video was released and details from the grand jury were leaked was at least in part fury at having the narrative muddied. No one likes to see fresh gospel fact-checked. No one wants to hear that their martyr was in fact no angel. And, in the case of Wilson, no one wants to see their demon humanized.

A new study reports that white Christians, long understood to be the primary shapers of American politics and culture, are rapidly losing their majority status across the country — even in traditionally conservative states.

Earlier this week, Jonathan Merritt of the Religion News Service dug into data from the American Values Atlas, a website unveiled late last year by the Public Religion Research Institute (PRRI) that aggregates polling information on the political opinions, values, and religious affiliations of Americans. The wealth of data is a lot to sift through, but Merritt pointed to a striking revelation: white Christians, once the majority in virtually every major population area in America, are now a minority in 19 states.

For their surveys, PRRI defines “white Christian” as evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Catholics, and Orthodox Christians who list their identity as “white, non-Hispanic.” (Interestingly, PRRI also includes white Mormons in this group, who are sometimes listed by sociologists as separate from the rest of Christianity due to their unique religious views and texts.)

Think Progress Facebook venner var svært begejstrede over at de hvide, long understood to be the primary shapers of American politics and culture, er på tilbagetog. Her et par af de første kommentarer fra de hundredevis skadefro HVIDE amerikanere

Leah AlleyYes they are, this is also true about “white” people in general,many are interracial, a large amount of people are gay,It wont be long before the mighty hunters and the fishermen are gone too. A new world is forming. Less racism more acceptance.

(…)

Kyung Sookpeople who have common sense would not follow christian today. They promoting hate.

Despite the grand myth that black economic progress began or accelerated with the passage of the Civil Rights laws and “War on Poverty” programs of the 1960s, the cold fact is that the poverty rate among blacks fell from 87 percent in 1940 to 47 percent by 1960. This was before any of those programs began.

Over the next 20 years, the poverty rate among blacks fell another 18 percentage points, compared to the 40-point drop in the previous 20 years. This was the continuation of a previous economic trend, at a slower rate of progress, not the economic grand deliverance proclaimed by liberals and self-serving black “leaders.”

Ending the Jim Crow laws was a landmark achievement. But, despite the great proliferation of black political and other “leaders” that resulted from the laws and policies of the 1960s, nothing comparable happened economically. And there were serious retrogressions socially.

Nearly a hundred years of the supposed “legacy of slavery” found most black children being raised in two-parent families in 1960. But thirty years after the liberal welfare state found the great majority of black children being raised by a single parent.

The murder rate among blacks in 1960 was one-half of what it became 20 years later, after a legacy of liberals’ law-enforcement policies. Public-housing projects in the first half of the 20th century were clean, safe places, where people slept outside on hot summer nights, when they were too poor to afford air conditioning. That was before admissions standards for public-housing projects were lowered or abandoned, in the euphoria of liberal non-judgmental notions. And it was before the toxic message of victimhood was spread by liberals. We all know what hell holes public housing has become in our times. The same toxic message produced similar social results among lower-income people in England, despite an absence of a “legacy of slavery” there.

If we are to go by evidence of social retrogression, liberals have wreaked more havoc on blacks than the supposed “legacy of slavery” they talk about. Liberals should heed the title of Jason Riley’s insightful new book, Please Stop Helping Us.

Illegitimacy is an important issue because it has a great influence on all statistical indicators of a population group’s progress or decline. In 1987, for the first time in the history of any American racial or ethnic group, the birth rate for unmarried black women surpassed that for married black women, and that trend continued uninterrupted until the passage of welfare reform. The black out-of-wedlock birth rates in some inner cities now exceed 80 percent, and most of those mothers are teens. Because unmarried teenage mothers—whatever their race—typically have no steady employment, nearly 80 percent of them apply for welfare benefits within five years after giving birth to their first child. No group can withstand such a wholesale collapse of its family structure without experiencing devastating social consequences.

Father-absent families—black and white alike—generally occupy the bottom rung of our society’s economic ladder. Unwed mothers, regardless of their race, are four times more likely to live in poverty than the average American. Female-headed black families earn only 36 percent as much as two-parent black families, and female-headed white families earn just 46 percent as much as two-parent white families. Not only do unmarried mothers tend to earn relatively little, but their households are obviously limited to a single breadwinner—thus further widening the income gap between one-parent and two-parent families. Fully 85 percent of all black children in poverty live in single-parent, mother-child homes.

(…)

Children in single-parent households are raised not only with economic, but also social and psychological, disadvantages. For instance, they are four times as likely as children from intact families to be abused or neglected; much likelier to have trouble academically; twice as prone to drop out of school; three times more likely to have behavioral problems; much more apt to experience emotional disorders; far likelier to have a weak sense right and wrong; significantly less able to delay gratification and to control their violent or sexual impulses; two-and-a-half times likelier to be sexually active as teens; approximately twice as likely to conceive children out-of-wedlock when they are teens or young adults; and three times likelier to be on welfare when they reach adulthood.

In addition, growing up without a father is a far better forecaster of a boy’s future criminality than either race or poverty. Regardless of race, 70 percent of all young people in state reform institutions were raised in fatherless homes, as were 60 percent of rapists, 72 percent of adolescent murderers, and 70 percent of long-term prison inmates. As Heritage Foundation scholar Robert Rector has noted, “Illegitimacy is a major factor in America’s crime problem. Lack of married parents, rather than race or poverty, is the principal factor in the crime rate.”

Since the black illegitimacy rate is so high, these pathologies plague blacks more than they affect any other demographic. “Even if white people were to become morally rejuvenated tomorrow,” writes black economist and professor Walter E. Williams, “it would do nothing for the problems plaguing a large segment of the black community. Illegitimacy, family breakdown, crime, and fraudulent education are devastating problems, but they are not civil rights problems.”

(…)

It bears mention that the astronomical illegitimacy rate among African Americans is a relatively recent phenomenon. As late as 1950, black women nationwide were more likely to be married than white women, and only 9 percent of black families with children were headed by a single parent. In the 1950s, black children had a 52 percent chance of living with both their biological parents until age seventeen; by the 1980s those odds had dwindled to a mere 6 percent. In 1959, only 2 percent of black children were reared in households in which the mother never married; today that figure approaches 60 percent.

The destruction of this stable black family was set in motion by the policies and teachings of the left, which for decades have encouraged blacks to view themselves as outcasts from a hostile American society; to identify themselves as perpetual victims who are entitled to compensatory privileges designed to “level the playing field” in a land where discrimination would otherwise run rampant; and to reject “white” norms and traditions as part and parcel of the “racist” culture that allegedly despises blacks.

As it has grown in popularity, the video has been transformed into a blank canvas, onto which America’s brave advocates of hyphenated-justice have sought to project their favored social theories. Evidently unwilling to let the spot stand on its own, Purdue’s Roxanne Gay wrote sadly that “it’s difficult and uncomfortable to admit that we have to talk about race/class/gender/sexuality/ability/etc, all at once.” Alas, she was not alone. Soon, the claims of “sexism” had been joined by accusations of “racism” and of “classism,” Hollaback had been forced to acknowledge that it had upset the more delicate among us, and those who had celebrated the video had been denounced as unreconstructed bigots. By this process was its message diluted and appropriated, the country’s most prominent peddlers of grievance and discord electing to squabble and bicker over its meaning, and to strip it of its value in favor of their own, fringe fixations.

In the exquisitely calibrated judgment of The Nation’s “racial justice” guru, Aura Bogado, the spot was “deeply problematic,” serving not to highlight the frequency with which women are bothered on the street, but instead perpetuating “the myth of the cult of white white womanhood by literally placing this white woman in neighborhoods where men of color will be the ones who catcall (or, in some instances, say hello to) her.” “Doing so,” Bogado writes, “makes it appear as if men of color are the perpetrators of all that is bad on this planet, which can only be balanced with the exigent need to therefore save white women above all else.” The only solution, she says, is to remake the video with a “universalizing” cast: the camera centering on, “say, a black trans woman.”

(…)

Consider how far its critics are stretching to discredit the experiment’s results. On Wednesday, Roxanne Gay suggested with palpable irritation that “the racial politics of the video are f****d up. Like, she didn’t walk through any white neighborhoods?” For her part, Salon’s Emily Gould went full circle, seeking to justify the behavior of the maligned cat-callers by submitting that they had been forced into it by the actions of white people writ large. “This kind of harassment,” Gould wrote, “can be a way marginalized groups talk back to the white gentrifiers taking over their neighborhoods.” In and of itself, this view strikes me as being grotesquely condescending — the perverse cousin, perhaps, of precisely the sort of racial stereotyping that progressives believe they have been divinely called upon to destroy.

To contend that the minorities depicted in the video are mere victims of circumstance and that they have been forced by their conditions into badgering innocent women on the street is to contend that those minorities lack agency, intelligence, sensitivity, and the capacity to reason — that they are child-like figures who act on their base instincts and who need excusing and explaining by their betters. Oddly enough, it is also to contend that the victim was either a “white gentrifier” herself, or a proxy for white gentrifiers, and that she therefore deserved the treatment she received. This presumption, it should go without saying, is typically anathema to the arbiters of feminist thought. One cannot help but wonder whether, weighed down by their own contradictions, the champions of “empowerment” have at last become what they despise themselves?

The only time I can recall being present when a woman was catcalled on the streets was once a few years ago when I was getting off the subway and a beautiful blonde woman dressed for a night out was getting on. Men stopped in their tracks; someone in the vicinity (no, not me) said, loudly enough for everyone nearby to hear, “Oh yeah, that’s a ten.”

Michael Brown was 6-foot-4 and 290 pounds. He had marijuana in his system and was purportedly involved in a strong-arm robbery prior to the shooting. He and a companion were walking in the middle of the street and obstructing traffic and therefore were admonished by a police officer to move to the sidewalk. Brown, who may have been pharmacologically impaired, became belligerent, and the ensuing struggle produced facial trauma and an orbital fracture of the police officer’s face. The officer, who may have been dazed by a blow to the cranium severe enough to produce a fracture, attempted to apprehend the assailant, and shots were fired, six of which struck the suspect, resulting in a fatality.

Race is the wild card in all this. The idea that you can tell who is innocent and who is guilty by the color of their skin is a notion that was tried out for generations, back in the days of the Jim Crow South. I thought we had finally rejected that kind of legalized lynch law. But apparently it has only been put under new management.

Television people who show the home of the policeman involved, and give his name and address — knowing that he has already received death threats — are truly setting a new low. They seem to be trying to make themselves judge, jury and executioner.

Then there are the inevitable bullet counters asking, “Why did he shoot him six times?” This is the kind of thing people say when they are satisfied with talking points, and see no need to stop and think seriously about a life and death question. If you are not going to be serious about life and death, when will you be serious?By what principle should someone decide how many shots should be fired? The bullet counters seldom, if ever, ask that question, much less try to answer it.

Since the only justifiable reason for shooting in the first place is self-protection, when should you stop shooting? Obviously when there is no more danger. But there is no magic number of shots that will tell you when you are out of danger.

Even if all your shots hit, that doesn’t mean anything if the other guy keeps coming and is still a danger. You can be killed by a wounded man.

Why isn’t anyone speaking the most obvious and most disturbing truth about what has been taking place in Ferguson? This is a lynch mob. It is unconcerned with the facts, impatient with due process, and it wants a severely injured officer who is probably the victim of a vicious criminal thug, indicted, tried and convicted or else. And the reason it wants him convicted is that he is white. This lynch mob even wants the prosecutor removed because his father was the victim of a black criminal 50 years ago.

This thuggery would be seen as classic lynch mob behavior except that it is composed mainly of blacks and its leaders include the Democrat Attorney General of the United States and the Democratic Governor the state of Missouri (on second thought this not so unusual). The mob is inflamed and abetted by an anti-white media that accepts the unfounded, actually ludicrous idea that unarmed black teens are regularly shot down in the streets by white police officers who are protected by a white supremacist power structure. As Bill O’Reilly courageously pointed out, there are approximately 12 million arrests every year in America and only 400 police shootings – and how many of these inspire criminal riots in the streets? Moreover, as O’Reilly did not mention, crime statistics show that a white person is 25 times more likely to be the victim of a violent crime committed by a black person than vice versa.

The rush to condemn Wilson’s conduct and the gallop to martyr Brown may have set land-speed records. The New Yorker, like numerous outlets, reported that Brown was walking to his grandmother’s home when confronted by Wilson. A video released from the by turns hapless and devious Ferguson Police Department alleges that he was actually walking from a thuggish and brazen shoplifting of a box of cigars from a convenience store.

That video is almost surely irrelevant to Wilson’s state of mind, since the police said he didn’t know about the shoplifting incident. It is, however, inconvenient from the martyrdom angle.

But don’t tell that to the legions of too-often-interchangeable activists, commentators, and reporters who have convinced themselves that we know exactly what happened, or at least all we need to know.

Al Sharpton, with decades of racial ambulance-chasing under his belt, insists that “America is on trial” in Ferguson.

Of course he does.

The New Black Panthers and the Nation of Islam claim that their groups control the situation in Ferguson. And the Ku Klux Klan is dipping its pillowcase-covered beak into this mess now, rounding out the whole legion of doom.

MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, with days of experience in such things under his belt, announced on Twitter, “I think the security problem in Ferguson is not solvable through policing. Until charges are brought against Wilson, this will go on.”

“The police” is a phenomenon of the modern world. It would be wholly alien, for example, to America’s Founders. In the sense we use the term today, it dates back no further than Sir Robert Peel’s founding of the Metropolitan Police in 1829. Because Londoners associated the concept with French-style political policing and state control, they were very resistant to the idea of a domestic soldiery keeping them in line. So Peel dressed his policemen in blue instead of infantry red, and instead of guns they had wooden truncheons.

So, when the police are dressed like combat troops, it’s not a fashion faux pas, it’s a fundamental misunderstanding of who they are. Forget the armored vehicles with the gun turrets, forget the faceless, helmeted, anonymous Robocops, and just listen to how these “policemen” talk. Look at the video as they’re arresting the New York Times and Huffington Post reporters. Watch the St Louis County deputy ordering everyone to leave, and then adding: “This is not up for discussion.”

Really? You’re a constable. You may be carrying on like the military commander of an occupying army faced with a rabble of revolting natives, but in the end you’re a constable. And the fact that you and your colleagues in that McDonald’s are comfortable speaking to your fellow citizens like this is part of the problem. The most important of the “nine principles of good policing” (formulated by the first two commissioners of the Metropolitan Police in 1829 and thereafter issued to every officer joining the force) is a very simple one: The police are the public and the public are the police. Not in Ferguson. Long before the teargassing begins and the bullets start flying, the way these guys talk is the first indication of how the remorseless militarization has corroded the soul of American policing.

Which brings us back to the death of Michael Brown. Let’s assume for the sake of argument that everything the police say about this incident is correct. In that case, whether or not the fatal shooting of Mr Brown is a crime, it’s certainly a mistake. When an unarmed shoplifter* in T-shirt and shorts with a five-buck cigar box in one hand has to be shot dead, you’re doing it wrong.

American police have grown too comfortable with the routine use of lethal force. To reprise a few statistics I cited three months ago:

So comparisons between the kill rates from American police and those of other developed nations aren’t worth bothering with. Indeed, the “justifiable homicides” of US cops are more like the total murder count for other advanced societies:

In Oz, the total number of murders per year isabout 270, so a nation of 23 million would have to increase by 50 per cent to commit as many homicides as American law enforcement. In Canada, whose urban police departments have absorbed certain American practices, a dozen or so people get shot dead by cops each year, which is again somewhat short of the US rate. Indeed, that 2012 “justifiable homicide” figure of 410 compares to a total Canadian homicide count for 2011 of598. In other words, in America 120,000 or so full-time law enforcement officers rack up the same number of homicides as about 24 million Canadians.

On August 20, the police released a cell phone video of the shooting. The confrontation in the video appears to differ substantially from the official police account. The police had said the man — identified as Kajieme Powell — confronted them aggressively while holding a knife with an overhand grip. According to the initial account, Powell was shot when he was just three or four feet from the officers.

In the video, the officers also appear to handcuff Powell after he was killed.

To the four clean-cut college freshman out on a double date, it had seemed like a typical McDonald’s: spanking clean, well-lighted, and safe. It was in a good neighborhood too, right next to Texas A&M University in College Station – a campus known for its friendly atmosphere and official down-home greeting: “howdy.”

Shortly after 2 A.M. that Sunday, they pulled into the parking lot of so-called “University McDonald’s” and beheld a scene unlike anything portrayed in all those wholesome McDonald’s television commercials. Before them, hundreds of young black males were loitering about, some without shirts.

Other local residents — the more cynical and world-weary, both whites and most blacks — would have taken one look at the crowd and driven off, dismissing many of the young and posturing black males as thugs. But not them: innocent white kids from the suburbs. They presumed this was post-racial America — and that they were in an easy-going college town.

“Hold on, they got a white dude.” And it sure seemed like fun — if the laughing and shrieking on this latest video of black mob violence is any indication.

This racial mayhem happened Saturday night in Memphis at a Kroger’s department store. WMCA Channel 5 out of Jackson, Mississippi picks up the story, all of it except the central organizing feature of the violence: All of the hundreds of people involved in the mayhem and violence are black. Except the victims. They are white:

“Three people were jumped by a large group of teenagers who were chanting ‘fam mob.’” The group, who came from CiCi’s Pizza, reportedly attacked a 25-year-old customer as he left his car to enter Kroger. Two employees, ages 17 and 18, were attacked while trying to stop the fight. Both were “struck several times in the head and face, while being knocked to the ground.” The victims say large pumpkins were thrown at their heads. They both eventually were knocked unconscious.”

However serious it seemed to the victims, the predators and their videographer were having a good time. Laughing and running.

The apes’ efforts to learn to be like humans is a racist metaphor for black people’s efforts to be more like white people, according to Amanda Bell of Yahoo Movies. The apes are, “Widely panned as exemplifying ‘negative racial stereotyping’ and connoting inequality between African-Americans and Caucasians,” she wrote.

The main problem? The ape leader, King Louie, was claimed by many to be a stand-in for the jazz musician Louis Armstrong, who was black.

“The original choice would have been offensive – Louis Armstrong animated as an ape,” said Robert Thompson, a media professor at Syrcause, in a statement. “The choice they went with had a minstrel show feel to it, also offensive.”

Racial tensions are inflamed at the University of California at Los Angeles following several incidents — most notably, one where a professor corrected the grammar, punctuation and capitalization in minority students’ assignments.

The act of correcting a black student was “micro-aggression,” according to the members of the student group “Call 2 Action: Graduate Students of Color,” which launched a sit-in during a subsequent meeting of the class.

Den bigote professor Val Rust prøvede at forsvare sit klare svigt

“I have attempted to be rather thorough on the papers and am particularly concerned that they do a good job with their bibliographies and citations, and these students apparently don’t feel that is appropriate,” he said in a statement, according to The Daily Bruin.

Some of the corrections were clarified by sit-in organizer Kenjus Watson. Rust told one student that she should not capitalize the word “indigenous” in her papers. This correction was ideologically-motivated, according to Watson.

Rust admitted that he likely made matters worse by not aggressively and proactively taking the side of a minority student who was engaged in an argument with a white female student. The minority student told the woman that she had no right to feel oppressed, and Rust did not express agreement either way.

For those unfamiliar with the knockout game, it’s how some black youths amuse themselves, especially in urban settings. The goal: use a single devastating punch to knock a victim unconscious. And when they succeed, they invariably react with merriment and laughter, as videos capturing the mayhem have revealed. Could racism be motivating these black youths? Nobody in the mainstream media dares suggest that this might be fueling the black mob violence in what President Obama said would be a post-racial era.

The knockout game, to be sure, has been around a few years. It has been mostly ignored by the mainstream media, which generally airbrushes out the black-on-white nature of the mayhem.